As the foodservice distribution industry shifts toward eCommerce, ensuring  market-and-strategy-aligned prices on eCommerce channels is critical. Read this blog post to discover three pricing strategies distributors can leverage to power intelligent digital selling and use eCommerce as a competitive advantage.

The Foodservice Distribution Industry is Slowly Embracing eCommerce

“In the food distribution industry, 80% of payments are done by mailing paper checks, and 80% of orders are made by leaving voicemails,” according to PYMNTS.com.

The foodservice distribution industry is one that prides itself on relationships and thus digital hasn’t been a high priority. It’s now apparent that digital commerce can be adopted thoughtfully to support the sales relationships forged in the field. W hen leading distributors make the leap into digital commerce or a new tool is created, it’s viewed as a game changer.

For example, at the end of 2022, US Foods launched a comprehensive eCommerce application, which is essentially a one-stop shop for customers to browse their catalog, make orders, and even track deliveries. Additionally, the eCommerce platform Pepper was built to “enable food distributors to find new customers, deepen relationships, grow revenue, and run more efficiently,” and secured more than $16 million in funding at the end of 2021.

As foodservice distribution makes greater shifts toward digital selling, ensuring market-and-strategy-aligned prices on eCommerce channels is critical. In this blog, we’ll detail three pricing strategies distributors can leverage to power intelligent digital selling and use eCommerce as a competitive advantage.

Activate Digital Commerce Data

Online customer interaction data is extremely valuable and presents pricing teams with opportunities to capitalize. It can be used to better inform pricing strategies and deliver eCommerce personalized pricing. Some of these data points and subsequent considerations include:

  • Cart abandonment: Incorporate an eCommerce-specific discount or other promotion to motivate completion of a transaction in the online cart or trigger a follow-up action for sales.
  • Pageviews: For pages with many views and a high bounce rate, does the price need to be better aligned to expectations?
  • Conversions: What are your hot spots, and is conversion aligning to that attention?
  • Inventory availability: Can a targeted discounting strategy help move inventory?  

Each of these data points can be used to set multiple pricing strategies online. Additionally, B2B companies must be able to dynamically adjust prices based on data insights in real-time.

With the help of price optimization and management software, it’s possible to deploy a number of advanced pricing strategies online, including:

  • Differentiating pricing for existing customers and new visitors at the product or SKU level.
  • Setting eCommerce-specific discounts that can be personalized (or targeted) to customer segments and product groups.
  • Offering customer-specific agreement prices and dynamic tiered pricing for quantity breaks.

Intelligence must be embedded into eCommerce sites and coupled with a flexible price management tool in the background that can enable teams to flexibly make price adjustments as needed. For example, high inventory and pageviews with low conversion might indicate the price is too high compared to online competitors. A targeted discount can be set in Zilliant Price Manager™ and updated instantaneously in your eCommerce site with the Zilliant Real-Time Pricing Engine™.

Ensure Pricing Consistency Across All Channels

 Continue reading "3 eCommerce Pricing Strategies for Foodservice Distributors"